Janea
Triplett
Iowa State University
College of Business
Ames, Iowa 50011 USA
rdtrip@iastate.edu

Abstract

Second Life is a three-dimensional multi-user
virtual environment with a vibrant economy, where
avatars (virtual representations of users) can
engage in innovative and unique business and
collaborative activities. The immersive nature of
this application creates ample authentic
opportunities for teaching entrepreneurship,
technology and e-commerce.

This article describes a
Masters of Business Administration elective course,
in which Second Life was utilized to teach strategic
and managerial issues related to e-commerce. The
collected data indicate that the students in this
course experienced a steep learning curve with
regards to the complicated interface of Second Life,
its complex social canvas and non-traditional
framing of teaching and learning. The article
discusses an array of pedagogical issues to be
considered in the design and development of an
immersive course.

Virtual worlds and their implications for teaching
and learning have been the source of
thought-provoking conversations in academia (Bronack,
Riedl & Tashner, 2005; Bronack, Riedl & Tashner,
2006; Dickey, 2005). It has been
suggested that virtual
worlds have the potential to generate rich
content and sustain meaningful connections to and
between people, places and events, bring together
space and context and transform the ways in which
people work and learn (Johnson, 2008). Second Life
(SL) is one instance of a well-recognized virtual
world that currently boasts more than 15 million
accounts and is marked by the presence of a strong
educational community. In fact, the New Media
Consortium that leads the largest educational
project in this virtual environment has been
supported by hundreds of real life educational
institutions and over 7,500 educators and students.

SL is a persistent virtual environment, where
virtual representations of users known as resident
avatars imagine, define and create their settings,
engage in creative activities, organize events and
grow networks.

In SL, residents can build and manipulate objects
and engage in diverse educational, social and
commercial activities. The three-dimensional quality
of this medium changes the scope and richness of
such activities in that it “…extends our notions of
the real world, just as the web extends our notions
of the network… (it) allows the visualization of
ideas and concepts in three dimensions that is
leading to new insights and deeper learning…allowing
people to work, learn, conduct business, shop and
interact in ways that promise to re-define how we
think about these activities – and even what we
regard as possible” (Johnson, 2008).

The vibrant character of this environment offers
particularly attractive opportunities for teaching
business-related concepts. SL is designed as a
self-contained economy, complete with its own
currency and currency exchange, the LindeX.
Business activity is thriving and growing with
residents retaining intellectual property rights to
the items they create. A resident can build a
virtual object like a chair, sell it to other
residents, and invest the earnings in a new
accessory for her avatar. In addition, because
residents can convert their
Linden
dollars to real world currency, they make real world
profits from their SL activities. In other words,
entrepreneurs can start and run virtual businesses
in a manner quite similar to the way people engage
in business in the real world. A unique virtual
environment, where entrepreneurship is so readily on
display, SL might become a useful tool for exposing
students to business and e-commerce concepts.

Engagement Through Immersion and Presence

Bowman and McMahan (2007) define virtual
environments as“…complex technologies that replaced
real-word sensory information with synthetic
stimuli, such as 3D visual imagery, spatialized
sound and force or tactile feedback. The goal of
immersive virtual environments was to let the user
experience a computer-generated world as if it were
real – producing a sense of presence, or “being
there”, in the user’s mind” (Bowman, McMahan, 2007,
2).

Slater (2003) differentiates immersion from presence
and describes immersion as objective and measurable,
whereas presence is context-dependent. In other
words, immersion relies on technical capabilities of
virtual reality technologies to render sensory
stimuli (realism of environmental settings, display
size, display resolution, etc.), whereas presence
draws from the individual’s subjective psychological
response to virtual reality and depends on a range
of factors including an individual’s state of mind.
The emergent complexity of virtual environments is
particularly shaped by the notion of presence, both
spatial and psychological, which motivates users to
participate in role-playing, socializing, building
and business activities (Castranova, 2005).

Educational uses of SL have largely depended on the
creation of a sense of presence in students and
provision of meaningful and enriching learning
experiences. For instance, the Harvard Extension
Program uses SL to present mock trials, where
avatars are invited to attend, observe and even
serve on the jury. Sarah Robins “Intellagirl”
exposes student assumptions and stereotypes through
carefully designed learning activities that allow
stepping into the shoes of other people (Robbins,
2008). Mary McAleer Balkun from Seton Hall
University encourages her students to design and
build virtual representations of the objects from
the class texts and thus reveal their own
interpretations of American Literature (Balkun,
2008). This kind of participation and engagement
shapes the emotional connection of users to the
content, events and people and supports building
knowledge through purposeful interaction.

The instructor of the MBA
course described in this paper used SL to create
this sense of presence in an active economy in order
to evoke student engagement and strong interest in
the subject matter, e-commerce and entrepreneurship.

Course Background

The course is an elective in the MBA program and
focuses on the topic of electronic commerce (i.e.,
e-commerce). E-commerce is an umbrella concept that
brings together a number of different organizational
functions such as marketing, management, supply
chain, and information systems and includes notions
related to the consumer purchasing process, the
characteristics of products and services, markets
and economies, the role of human behavior, and the
entrepreneurial process.

The course is typically taught to demonstrate
organizational and contextual factors that influence
the environment in which e-commerce systems operate.
Students learn by engaging in hands-on experiential
activities that involve real-life problems as
presented by business leaders and entrepreneurs.

SL offered a unique environment to facilitate such
interaction, because students could engage with
businesses, and observe successful in-world (i.e. in
the SL world) entrepreneurs as the latter eagerly
shared their professional experiences.

Students in the course came from one of three
programs at the university: the MBA program, the MS
in Information Systems program, or the Human
Computer Interaction program. Several students
participated in the course from a distance (e.g.,
one student was from Dubai) while others
participated by attending lectures in the studio
classroom. All lectures were streamed to online
students who could watch and participate
synchronously or watch the recordings of the
lectures at a later time. Streaming content and
recordings were captured and delivered using Adobe®
Acrobat® Connect™, a multimedia web conferencing and
eLearning software package that supports audio,
video, discussions boards and application sharing.

Conceptualizing a virtual course

The instructor was first exposed to SL in the fall
of 2006 and initially approached it as a research
topic. The professor soon realized that one of the
most prominent user groups in SL were educators. As
a result, he determined that SL would be part of
future courses where the capabilities of SL fit the
course content. The first venture into using SL
occurred in the shape of an unstructured course
assignment where students were asked to explore the
features of SL, understand its culture and economy
and develop a business model and plan for a SL
business. Students were encouraged to create their
accounts and enter the environment, but could also
learn about entrepreneurship and business activities
in-world using web-based searches and other methods
of research. The results were encouraging because
students reported that it was an enjoyable
experience and that they thought that the
environment was useful for teaching some of the
concepts that related to the course. Nevertheless,
the unstructured project that consisted of
essentially turning students loose for independent
exploration limited the ability of the instructor to
manage learning and teaching effectively.

Based on experiences gained from this initial,
exploratory use, the instructor decided to
incorporate SL into the graduate-level e-commerce
course, add greater structure to the learning
process and employ SL not only as a focal point for
course content but also a tool for delivering course
content. With regards to this last point, the
instructor recognized that SL might serve as an
effective tool for communication because it allowed
students to interact with him and others as well
as the guest lecturers in a flexible, interactive,
and engaging manner. As a consequence, the
graduate-level e-commerce course was designed to
immerse students by not only designing the course
content around the SL culture, environment and
people, but also by using SL as a virtual classroom
to facilitate communication, learning and
exploration (e.g., guest speakers spoke about SL
culture, businesses and history, the course project
involved the question of whether a non-profit
organization should use SL for fund raising, etc.).

Structuring a virtual course

Developing and delivering a course using a virtual
environment requires a considerable investment in
planning, design, and development. At this
university, no other instructor, department, or
college had used SL or any similar virtual
environment for course delivery, so this course was
essentially designed and built from the ground up.
As such, numerous components needed to be put in
place to develop the course.

First, the course could not be delivered without the
assistance of professional support staff and a
sponsoring university entity. In this case, the
instructor held an organizational meeting with staff
several months prior to the delivery of the
e-commerce course to lay out the plans and solicit
support. Staff from the university’s Center for
Excellence in Learning and Teaching volunteered to
assist in the course design and development.
Furthermore, the administrator of the distance
education group from the
College
of
Engineering
agreed to purchase a SL island and provide student
support in building facilities on this virtual
space. Once the commitments and support had been
garnered, the instructor needed to develop the
content. This included not only the conceptual
content associated with the course, but also the
infrastructure to support students within SL. In
this case, because the course was designed to focus
on e-commerce as it existed in virtual worlds like
SL and the course was to be delivered to introduce
communication capabilities of SL, both the course
content and classroom infrastructure needed to be
developed. Both of these endeavors required
considerable planning and forethought. For example,
in the case of course content, the instructor needed
to identify a target organization that could provide
a problem to be addressed as a class project.
Furthermore, guest speakers who could provide
students with information about the SL environment
needed to be identified, solicited and scheduled.
Each of these activities required a considerable
investment in time and energy on the part of the
instructor and support staff.

Similarly, the development of the SL island
infrastructure required considerable planning and
development long before the course was delivered.
The immersive nature of the course required the
instructor to design and build resources within the
virtual space to accommodate classroom lectures,
course exercises, and team activities. For example,
it was necessary to develop a classroom facility,
build project activity spaces, position instructions
on the island, and design and test meeting rooms.
While the instructor was experienced in using many
SL features, self-training was required on how to
build complex structures, code scripts and
conceptualize and plan how space would be utilized
during various classroom activities.

Since no students had experienced SL prior to the
course and only a few students had participated in
video games or other environments even remotely
similar to SL, considerable effort was needed to
guide students. For example, students needed to set
up a SL account and go through orientation island,
and thus be ready for the first official component
of the course. As a result, the instructor alerted
students to the need to sign up for a SL account
well in advance of the course’s starting date.

In addition, the instructor needed to orient
students to the SL environment. In this case,
orientation was accomplished using two techniques.
First, a show and tell video was produced
demonstrating how to sign up for an account, perform
basic functions, and travel to the virtual classroom
space. This video was useful because not all
students would be able to attend orientation
sessions, some might sign up for the course late and
others might want to have a resource they could
refer to at a later time. Second, orientation
sessions had to be offered to familiarize students
with the environment, answer questions to provide
targeted assistance and discuss the purpose and
goals of SL for this course.

Learning Activities

A chain of learning activities was developed to both
gradually introduce student-users to the virtual
world of SL and prompt meaningful learning of
business concepts via a scavenger hunt, a series of
SL guest speaker presentations and a course final
project.

The goal of the scavenger hunt activity was to help
students co-experience and explore SL as they were
sent on a mission to discover interesting places and
learn basic SL skills. Six locations were introduced
in the broader SL context (i.e., outside of the
instructor’s controlled educational facility), which
were cultural or historical venues that represented
exemplary uses of SL. To complete the exercise,
students needed to retrieve the instructions,
decipher the embedded hints and teleport to the
location where the item they were searching for was
located. This exercise had to be completed as a
team and required that students coordinate their
activities, communicate effectively and collaborate
in the process. Successful completion was achieved
when the team leader submitted a note card that
contained details of the team’s collaboration as
outlined in the Scavenger Hunt instructions.
Additionally, each student was requested to write a
reflective essay answering several questions which
probed into their experiences during this adventure.

The professor and the support staff identified guest
speakers, vetted them for their suitability for the
course, made formal invitations, arranged the
logistics for their visits and facilitated
presentations. The guest speakers ranged from a SL
small business entrepreneur to an educational
consultant to a representative from the IBM
Corporation. Each of the eight speakers delivered a
short lecture in SL through voice streaming,
showcasing their products and services and accepted
questions from students.

Lastly, the students were required to prepare an
in-depth final report for a local non-profit
organization which was interested in the potential
of SL to facilitate their outreach and awareness
initiatives. This project required that students
consider more than mere technical or parochial
characteristics of SL, but also examine deeper-level
issues such as strategic alignment, risk,
brand/image management, etc.

Research Data and Analysis

Twenty-nine graduate students participated in this
study. Collected data included two sets: student
guided reflections completed after the scavenger
hunt activity and responses to the PlusDelta
surveys. Instructions for guided reflections
contained questions that probed into student
personal and team experiences of the scavenger hunt.
PlusDelta surveys inquired how the use of SL
enhanced or impeded student learning in this course.

This study used a constant comparative method (Ragin,
1987) to code the data into themes, then in
categories and finally into concluding results.
Coding was first analyzed within each individual
student reflection piece and then across the entire
reflection data as a whole. Before coding the raw
reflection data, coding rules were operationalized
as suggested by Holsti (1969).

The research problem was defined in terms of
positive and negative statements expressed in the
reflection data. The unit of analysis was a
complete statement. Conjunctions (i.e. and, but,
for, or, yet) were used as dividing points to
separate phrases into one complete statement. The
system of enumeration was based on positive or
negative statements about the SL experience.
Positive descriptors toward the technology included
words such as “easy, good, helpful, intuitive, rich,
productive, simple or useful.” Negative descriptors
toward the technology included words such as
“annoying, distracting, frustrating, high learning
curve, overkill, problems, or slow.”

Positive statements about SL resulted in distinct
themes such as: group meetings, quality
communication, individual expression, interesting
environment, nonverbal communication, group
exploration, community connection, fun environment,
and sense of team. Negative statements about SL
resulted in distinct themes such as: chat screen
lagged, too complex for simple chat, steep learning
curve, high demand for system resources, limited
chat features, high technical requirements, avatar
did not enhance chat, environment distracting, and
other avatars might interrupt. Within these
positive and negative themes, two major categories
emerged to describe the SL experience – educational
and technological.

Steep Learning Curve

Students emphasized experiencing a steep learning
curve focusing, in particular, on: (a) the
complicated interface of SL, (b) its complex social
canvas and (c) non-traditional framing of teaching
and learning.

Complicated interface

All students were closely mentored during the
process of setting up their SL accounts. They were
sent detailed instructions accompanied by video
explanations prior to creating avatars. The
instructor added every student to the list of
contacts and demonstrated the basics of navigating
and building. The support staff members were readily
available to assist with advanced actions, such as
editing avatar appearances, sorting out inventories,
taking snapshots, etc.

Additionally, groups of students were sent on a
Scavenger Hunt to discover interesting locations in
SL and practice basic technological skills, as
outlined in this example: “One of the most famous
buildings of SL is Governor Linden’s Mansion. Find
it using search in-world (click “Search” on the
bottom of the viewer, select places and enter
“governor” as a keyword). Or tp (teleport) each
other once you find the mansion. Look around to find
your way to the basement (hint: it is close to the
aquarium by the down arrow). Find a time capsule in
the basement that was buried in 2003. It reads
“Don’t open until…”. When will capsule be open?” In
this challenge the students not only were shown a
historic place in SL, but also encouraged to use the
search tool and practice moving and zooming in on
objects as well as collaborate effectively with all
team members.

Students reported being overwhelmed with the
complexity of the interface of the SL viewer.
Because students were charged with sophisticated
assignments, they felt they were pushed to examine
the interface of SL more carefully. Even with
instructions clearly posted on the walls of
structures throughout the island and extra help
available from experienced users, these students
expressed their frustration with the clutter of the
3-D scene, such as numbers, texts, glyphs and a
plethora of options and settings.

One student recollected that “... I spent forever
trying to figure out where to go. It wasn’t until I
realized that I just needed to spin my avatar around
until I saw stairs, did I know what to do. It took
the enjoyment out of SL. It was like being in Stat
class with Jump – okay, answer the question using
Jump, only we aren’t going to tell you how to use to
Jump. You just have to get the right answer for the
test.” This student equated struggling with the SL
interface to taking a test in the statistics class,
meaning the student knew there should be ways to
navigate in this environment, but the visual clutter
was very confusing even after much practice. This is
obvious in the comment of one student: “SL made me
spend too much time to get familiar with the
interface of this software and the complex
operations [it requires]”. Yet another learner
remarked that “The learning curve so steep, that [I
felt] this tool was not second nature [for users].”

SL communication modes were perceived as a serious
obstacle. Students were confused by the large number
of messages appearing in local and group chat in
addition to instant messaging (an exemplary comment
came from one learner who was upset by “…the
enormous amount of content to review and see which
was quite distracting at times”). Others were
dissatisfied with the lack of the group discussion
organization. Although all guest speakers used
audio, the questions from students came via a group
chat. The chat log often grew very complicated when
interjected with numerous comments by student
avatars. While the spontaneity of such group
discussions was appreciated by some, others felt
lost having several chat windows open and thus
adding up to information clutter.

Complex social nature

The complex social nature of SL presented another
challenge as guest speakers unveiled how their
businesses operated in-world. Initially, students
felt very skeptical about other people investing
time and resources into SL. Because this medium was
at first perceived by students as a game with
graphics that “…were behind their time” (as noted by
one of them), the students were not sure if others
might seriously engage in-world.

But as a DJ talked about hosting Friday disco
parties to raise awareness about cancer research, an
educational consultant discussed the mission of his
enterprise to enhance teaching and learning through
meaningful uses of SL, and an IBM representative
eloquently spoke about promoting her company through
SL activities and events (one student reported that
the
IBM
representative’s lecture was more eye-opening for
me, coming from a corporate environment.”), students
came to see this medium as a platform for active
social life and networking.

Several students pointed out that “… [from these
presentations] some of the basic principles are
common to business practices both in RL (Real Life)
and SL. People get connected to each other and
interact with the help of their avatars and they
have to follow some business rules in order to
attract customers which is almost the same as
getting customers in real life just because even
though they seem to be avatars, yet behind each is a
real person who would deal and feel things the same
way as he does in real life. I learned a lot about
the activities and business processes in SL after
attending different interactive discussions with
people in SL which helped me learn about how the
business processes took place in SL, the basic idea
behind which is same as that of any business in real
world.”

The speakers’ presentations also helped to reinforce
the idea that businesses flourish in SL because of
the rich and complex social canvas that sets this
medium apart from an electronic game. Unlike a game,
this environment emerged more complex and involved
unlimited by pre-defined goals and objectives.
Making parallels between human and economic
processes between real and SL worlds required
sophisticated intellectual efforts from students as
this response indicated: “I originally thought that
SL was a worthless online environment. While I do
play video games, I did not see the diverse
community that is present in SL. Upon seeing what
SL is and what it is all about, I now see that there
can be fun and possibly some benefit to being active
in the online community such as SL.” Another
response indicated that the holistic picture of SL
as an online community with full-fledged social and
economic interactions painted in this course pushed
this respondent to extend and explore new boundaries
in e-commerce.

Alongside with student maturing understanding of the
social canvas of SL, there arose concerns about
adult content. Although all learning activities
occurred on the island that disallowed access to
those not associated with the course, the instructor
warned the students about the risk of exposure to
adult content when they were exploring the virtual
world of SL. The students were strongly recommended
to exit the application should such an exposure
accidentally happen. One student articulated that
“…as [I] explored the world I was very tentative
about talking to people, so I know I did not reap
the benefits of the social networking aspect. I was
always afraid of finding things in world that I
don’t want to be exposed to.” Another student
fiercely disagreed by pointing out that most of
exploration that happened in class was limited to
sterile sites: “There is an enormous amount of
mature content and its impact on e-commerce, modern
sociology and communication studies can be
overlooked if one is not willing to at least
consider exploring some of the more mature facets of
SL’s use. It would have been especially interesting
learning more about how, as a social tool, SL
circumvents conventional wisdom about disabilities,
beauty and societal taboos. It would have been even
better to incorporate more social context into the
use of this tool.”

Non-traditional framing of teaching and learning

In the virtual world of SL students were pushed
outside of their traditional framework of teaching
and learning, out of the brick walls of their
auditoriums into out of the ordinary learning
spaces. The professor who created the majority of
structures for teaching and learning on the island
departed from the idea of replicating the psychical
world, but rather devised large open spaces that
emphasized the uniqueness of this online
environment. The classroom was located on top of a
mountain and had a convenient speaker podium and
plenty of seating capacity for the audience. The
team spaces were floating in the air thus allowing
groups of students to engage in conversations
without being interrupted by other avatars. The
rotunda with teleportation signs in the middle of
the island functioned as an easy, one-click access
to any learning space.

While mesmerized by the unusual academic settings in
which learning and teaching were framed, students
quickly brought up the distractions that came with
it. Several respondents were disappointed with
classmates manipulating objects from their
inventories during the classroom discussions. One of
them admitted to experimenting with SL features on
several occasions and not paying much attention to
both guest speakers and classroom discussions.

Second Life Potential from Student Perspective

Despite the challenges faced by the steep learning
curve of the SL interface and virtual culture,
student reflection pieces also spoke to the rich
potential they saw in this new environment. When
writing of the learning environment, one student
noted that, “I learned much more from building and
exploring than I would have learned from a standard
lecture format.” In this statement, the use of
active verbs such as building and exploring
suggested that this student felt more engaged with
the virtual activities than a traditional university
lecture. Many students mentioned the potential of
SL in team development and collaboration
activities. One student wrote, “SL really allowed
us to create a sense of team, something that
develops fairly naturally in face-to-face class
meetings.” Another student echoed this feeling of
virtual closeness by stating that, “Having an avatar
involved during the chat made the experience seem
more human or real, even though it is still virtual
communication.” Finally, in their reflections these
students spoke of the potential of SL to connect
globally with business experts. As one student
wrote, “I really liked the opportunity that SL
offered to us to get specialists from any place in
the world to come and speak to us in the classroom.”

Second Life Potential from Instructor Perspective

The instructor identified several benefits and
opportunities for using SL for teaching and
learning. First, SL has great potential as a tool
to support distance education. The course described
in this paper was conducted in a blended mode. One
of the observations that the instructor made was
that SL leveled the playing field for all students
and gave members of distributed teams the
opportunity to function at the same level and use
the same set of tools. As a result, SL has a great
potential to foster team development and
cohesiveness in situations when team members are not
collocated. This represents one of the broadly
applicable benefits of SL; that is, the support of
team communication and collaboration. While the
learning curve for SL was an impediment for some
students, the conclusion that the instructor arrived
at was that the net benefit significantly outweighed
the costs to both the instructor (i.e., in
preparation) and students (i.e., in learning to use
the platform).

A second benefit of using SL is that it could be
used to expose students to a vibrant and active
economic and business environment that allowed
students to immerse themselves in the concepts and
activities that were relevant to the course content.
For example, students were able to not only dialog
with SL guest speakers, but also speakers could
bring up objects to illustrate a point or take
students on a field trip to see a site or object. In
addition, students had the opportunity to explore
the broader SL environment and experience the good,
the bad, and the ugly side of it. SL is, for lack
of a better term, a microcosmic simulator of human
behavior. As such, noble and virtuous components of
human expression are displayed in museums, fund
raising ventures, creative and aesthetically
pleasing buildings and structures, and other
beautiful and socially responsible endeavors. On
the other hand, SL also puts on display expressions
of questionable behavior, violence, hatred,
antisocial behavior, and bigotry with, for example,
the random acts of grievers who disrupt events or
deface properties. A distinct advantage of SL for
education is that both these seedy expressions of
human behavior as well as the noble can be
experienced with little effort, with only a slight
amount of risk, and with a high degree of relevance.
As such, the word simulator is apropos because it
allows the instructor to expose students to
simulations that are both quite realistic but also
quite harmless.

Yet another benefit gleaned by the instructor is
that the rich and interactive nature of SL creates a
learning experience that is exciting and engaging.
One of the challenges in education is to engage
students in learning activities, lectures, and
dialogs that are enriching, interesting, and, at the
same time, educational. Students are increasingly
expecting and in some cases demanding greater
relevance and vibrancy in their educational
experiences. Traditional lectures that use a push
mode of learning will likely continue to decrease in
effectiveness as an increasing number of students
arrives in the classroom with a plugged-in view of
the world. For many students today the perspective
is becoming more common that if it’s not on Facebook,
Twitter, or YouTube, perhaps it is not worth
knowing. As a vibrant social network that engages
students not merely with facts and figures, but with
facts and figures embodied in personas and actions,
SL creates a learning space that will increasingly
be useful for engaging a new generation of students

Immersion and Presence - Are We There Yet?

The above-described course attempted to stimulate
student engagement with the subject matter through
immersion and presence. From the careful analysis of
available data, the authors arrived at the
conclusion that students experienced immersion in
this course rather than presence. Although a steep
learning curve was largely attributed to the
complicated SL interface, students felt capable to
master SL technicalities even if gradually. A
plugged-in generation, they deemed themselves
capable of figuring out the subtleties of the SL
viewer. They also appreciated the spatial character
of SL 3-D scenes, in which they were immersed unlike
2-D projections of the environments commonly used in
academia (i.e. pictures in the books). Visual
stimuli afforded by the virtual world of SL equally
contributed to student engagement. Finally, because
the nature of course content was ultimately
different when presented through the lens of SL, the
learners reported developing awareness of the kind
of information that normally goes unnoticed.

However, immersed in SL, students did not display
intense signs of presence. The feeling of being
there, in this case, was not developed, partially
due to the short duration of the course (six weeks),
and partially because this course did not
specifically focus on enabling presence. Presence
takes time and effort as an individual chooses to
become involved with the SL community and depends on
a variety of subjective psychological factors. For
this course the feeling could have influenced the
effectiveness of student learning. On the other
side, intense presence might have been distracting
learners from an unbiased evaluation of the economic
processes of SL. To assess this hypothesis, the
instructor designed a slip-on avatar course the
following semester, in which fully configured and
ready-to-go slip-on avatars were distributed to
students. The research findings from the slip-on
avatar course will be disseminated in a separate
paper.

General Recommendations for Developing an Immersive
Course

Seek out and make use of existing teaching and
technology support structures within the
university.

An instructor will be more successful with the
assistance from professional support staff.

Administrators’ support is essential.

When introducing a virtual world into a course for
the first time, budget considerable time for
planning, design, and implementation of course
content and infrastructure.

An instructor will be more successful when an
investment is made in planning and designing how a
virtual world’s content will be meshed with the
course content.

It is important to orient students in their
exploration of a virtual world.

Students will benefit from an advanced notice of
the use of a virtual world in the course.

Students must be provided tools to support their
immersion in a virtual world.

An instructor must invest in planning and
designing infrastructure to use a virtual world
for teaching and learning.

Jonson, L. (2008). Online virtual worlds:
Applications and avatars in a user-generated medium.
Testimony in the U.S. House of Representatives,
April 1. Last retrieved May 25, 2008 from http://energycommerce.house.gov/cmte_mtgs/110-ti-hrg.040108.Johnson-testimony.pdf